They said they never sued another company related to this patent, but they forgot to mention they have sent Cease and Desist(s) [1] [1] http://yogainternational.com/article/view/patents-and-lawsui...
That is the point of the patent, isn't it? They have the patent so that no one else can use the same filming style. They don't intend to sue anyone, but if someone is filming in ways that are too similar to theirs, they will try to get them to stop. That can range from polite emails to cease-and-desists.
YogaGlo Update
41–50 of 73 posts
Re: YogaGlo Update
#421. Junk patents abound in today's digital world, where "method" and "computer" have been endlessly linked to suggest that something is innovative when it is not. YogaGlo's patent is a bit different but in the same spirit of method madness.
2. For much of this, we can thank the loosening standards imposed over the past two decades by a specialized patent appeals court that has given overblown significance to what once was a highly specialized field of tremendous importance to the competitors immediately involved but not to average people. Result: average people see the flood of junk limiting, irritating, and frustrating their lives and are mad as can be at the skewed results.
3. In a parallel world known as that of the law, it is business as usual, with the junk patents having become monetizing weapons in the hands of aggressors and with the industry generally profiting at every angle from the "growth business" that patent litigation has become. Most of the actors see the insanity but also see nothing at all that is poised to dislodge it because the many tentacles that combine to choke off common sense are so diffused and dispersed, with each having its own reason for failing to act: congressional leaders beholden to lobbying interests, market-leading device-makers seeking to keep competitive advantage by any means possible, those who seek to challenge them having of necessity to spend billions to buy their own arsenal by which to protect themselves, federal circuit judges who have a built-in incentive to magnify the importance of patents and of their role in shaping the "inventions" of the future, a federal system of checks and balances in which a Supreme Court must defer to constitutional restraints on its power to reform the mess it sees before it, a patent office that is overwhelmed with junk applications and simultaneously pressured to move them along in the system without being too finicky about which ones pass or not, and a startup community that is basically schizophrenic on the point in philosophically condemning the system while, in the case of any given venture, embracing it insofar as it gives to the venture a potential sustainable competitive advantage.
4. Seen in this context, the YogaGlo defense is actually as good a technical defense of a junk patent as one might make: it pleads that people try to understand that, as a business matter, the company needs to stake out its turf and block others from intruding on it through the same sort of legal means that all other ventures use and, thus, what should be so wrong in its doing what the whole world is doing anyway; it argues that the thing really is as narrow as one might imagine given that all sorts of non-patentable ways do and always have existed for filming yoga classes; and it claims that the company is really just reasonable and restrained and hardly intending to create the sort of dust-up that followed in the wake of people's shocked realization that they (or people they like) might get sued for doing what used to be a routine filming of an instructional video. Imagine if you were given the awful task of trying to defend this thing. How would you have done it better? From the company's standpoint, this is the baser half of the startup world's schizophrenic attitude toward patents: we may oppose the hell out of it philosophically but, when it comes to pragmatic advantage, stand aside and let us do what we must do to meet our business goals.
5. Of course, in the end, this is really just one more junk patent and so the company's defense comes off as inadequate and even insincere. Yes, others may have made some unfair statements that distorted the facts but the company's problem is that such statements, though perhaps unfair in a narrow sense, perfectly capture the sense that most people have that this grotesque thing should not be allowed to stand and that no tears of sympathy need be wasted on those who brought it into existence, whatever their motives.
Re: YogaGlo Update
#43Re: YogaGlo Update
#44There should be a huge amount of prior art for this? Surely before yoga glo there must be ONE video with the same angle?
less than 20 seconds of youtube searching. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vOt35-GQ_8w
Re: YogaGlo Update
#45They said they never sued another company related to this patent, but they forgot to mention they have sent Cease and Desist(s) [1] [1] http://yogainternational.com/article/view/patents-and-lawsui...
That is the point of the patent, isn't it? They have the patent so that no one else can use the same filming style. They don't intend to sue anyone, but if someone is filming in ways that are too similar to theirs, they will try to get them to stop. That can range from polite emails to cease-and-desists.
Re: YogaGlo Update
#46Re: YogaGlo Update
#47Re: YogaGlo Update
#48> Below are a few visual examples of what our patent protects. Note, there are many other ways companies and teachers can create yoga classes that do not look anything like YogaGlo’s classes: I discounted every single word they said after seeing the pictures! I cannot believe any sane person, much less a patent official, can believe that those ought to be patentable. What came to mind was a Sanskrit proverb many Indi…
Re: YogaGlo Update
#49Since this is relevant to the tech community let me paint a picture before people start sharpening the pitchforks... I've been meeting with investors recently and one of the most common questions/comments has been - "Why can't someone else just do the same thing? Can a group of Stanford grads build this in a weekend?" This line of questioning is relevant to pretty much all startups today. The reality is, from what I…
1. The 2008 Berkeley Patent Survey (http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1429049), finding that while only 25% of all software startups file patents, about 67% of venture-funded startups do.
2. "Do Patents Facilitate Financing in the Software Industry?", Ronald J. Mann, 2005, (http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=510103), finding that the answer seem to be "yes", amongst other interesting conclusions.
Re: YogaGlo Update
#50Since this is relevant to the tech community let me paint a picture before people start sharpening the pitchforks... I've been meeting with investors recently and one of the most common questions/comments has been - "Why can't someone else just do the same thing? Can a group of Stanford grads build this in a weekend?" This line of questioning is relevant to pretty much all startups today. The reality is, from what I…
Your business being easily copyable is not a 'wrong' that should be righted by the legal system. That's a really, really nutty notion.